Steps towards the meaning of synthesis: Interview with Amod Lele, part 1

As previously announced, I am beginning a series of interviews with figures whose thought I find interesting, challenging, compelling, and worth your attention.

This post is the first half of an interview I conducted with Amod Lele. (You can read the second half in the following post.) Lele is Lecturer in Philosophy at Boston University and also teaches (his official title is "Visiting Researcher") at Boston University's Center for the Study of Asia; he also blogs extensively at the Indian Philosophy Blog (which he helped to found) and at his own blog Love of All Wisdom. I stumbled on the latter very soon after I began blogging myself, and have yet to find a blog more congenial to my own disposition -- though not always to my own (un)settled positions. The key to this feeling-simpatico is really right there in his blog title. It's love of wisdom -- not logical hair-splitting, nor fisticuffs with big words, but a real, full-blooded, old-fashioned and up-to-date, quest for that elusive thing we used to call the meaning of life. But it's love of All wisdom -- not just the few bits of the story that have wound up canonized by contemporary western university philosophy departments. My impression is that Lele is just as likely to be reading Jaimini or Kūkai or Xiong Shili, as he is Plato or Augustine or Marx. This isn't multiculturalism with footnotes, but real learning, in every sense of the word. Lele is frank about where he sees holes in his erudition, and displays a very becoming modesty in the face of what we have to acknowledge is the project of a lifetime, or more. But he's also willing to say -- gently but firmly -- when something looks, to his mind, problematic, wrong-headed or unworkable. He's called me on this a few times; I assume and hope he will continue.

The interview was conducted in two stages, written and a spoken (which do not correspond to the two halves into which, for convenience, I've broken it). After Lele agreed to the project, I sent him a preliminary set of questions, to which he responded in writing. I encouraged him to take his time in answering, and he did. The second part of the interview happened much more quickly. After I had meditated on these answers for a short while, we had a long conversation, during which we allowed the course of the discussion to go where it would, occasionally returning to the beaten track of his original responses, but making some long and interesting detours. I then folded the transcript into the original written exchange, editing somewhat for readability. I have taken out most of our "um's" and a few false starts, but I have not tried to give spoken exchanges a more grammatical sheen, nor have I disguised written ones with an ersatz informality. Doubtless certain seams are visible, but I trust the whole is coherent. (There are links to some of Lele's writings (and other background) in both material, so if you really fancy playing the spot-the-seams game, don't rely on the links for your clues. Needless to say, I do not think this is the most interesting aspect of the exchange.)

Although I did not compose the initial questions nor conduct the interview guided by it, this succinct post of Lele's outlining his philosophical stance is a useful one for keeping in mind as you read.

The second half of the interview will appear in one week.

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Skholiast: Your dissertation was on Śāntideva and Martha Nussbaum. A surprising juxtaposition, one might think – though perhaps not as surprising as it seems. Nussbaum’s own work, after all, is grounded in the Greeks, and she spends a good deal of attention on the Stoic and Epicurean traditions – lesser-known voices from antiquity which turn out to have quite a lot to say today. So Śāntideva, albeit a voice from another tradition, is less a stretch than at first glance.

Were you always drawn to philosophy as a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary practice? Was there perhaps a key moment which pressed this home for you? Is it grounded in important biographical facts about your own life?

Amod Lele: No, yes, and yes. I first started learning about philosophy in high school, where what drew me was Western ethics; in undergrad my interests moved to Hegel and Marx. I was curious about what non-Western philosophy might involve, and read Heinrich Zimmer’s Philosophies of India around my fourth year, but at that point it really wasn’t much more than curiosity. Zimmer didn’t really get me into Indian philosophy, probably because at that point I was still extremely suspicious of “religion”, and Zimmer insisted (generally correctly) that in India one could not really separate Indian philosophy from most of what is called “religion”. This all changed for me in Thailand, shortly after undergrad, when Theravāda Buddhism provided me with a life-changing epiphany. That was when the importance of cross-cultural philosophy became obvious to me. It seemed to me that Hegel was right about most things and the Pali texts were also right about most things, and yet they also seemed diametrically opposed on many counts. Could they be reconciled?

S: So, Can they?

A.L.: Whew.… Well, my answer to this is probably going to change from day to day. The answer is in principle Yes. I do think that truth is one; I don’t think there is ever a point of radical disjuncture. I think Hegel would clearly be in sympathy with that expression; for him the Pali texts are already part of the synthesis, just at a very low level he hardly needs to mention. For the Pali texts themselves, that becomes an interesting question, one I’m trying to think through more these days – a methodological question. One thing I think people have not thought enough about is how non-western epistemologies would inform our questions of method. There’s a certain sense that people have that the West is the only place where we’ve really thought through questions of method, so our methodological thinkers have to be from here. And that sounds orientalist, but when you actually get to the point of asking “what’s Kumārila’s methodological take?” – you realize this results in a vision in which we all should perform the Agnihotra sacrifice, and where the Vedas are the bearers of all truth, and that’s something which is pretty hard for most of us, including most modern Indians, to swallow. So I think there’s a lot of work that’s still to be done, on that score. What I’m currently focusing my intellectual attention on, is a project engaging with Alasdair MacIntyre’s work. It’s still in the very early stages and I’m not sure what form it will take, but it does have to do with a lot of these kinds of methodological questions in cross-cultural philosophy, about how a synthesis is possible.

You know, part of the issue is that any synthesis has to go towards – it has to go very, very deep, to the roots, in a way that requires a very long engagement if it’s going to be anything more than superficial conflict resolution. Conflict resolution has its place, when there’s immediate conflict that has to be dealt with, but there’s no war going on between Hegelians and Theravādins.

S: So, what would happen if – if it could be demonstrated to you that they can’t be reconciled?

A.L.: I guess the first question is what that would mean, to have such a demonstration – what that would even consist of. Not even in the details of the arguments, just—what would it mean to say that they cannot be reconciled?

S: This is part of my way of asking, what does reconciliation mean?

A.L.: Right; and that’s probably the bigger point. It’s hard to say that in advance; but for me, what’s most fundamentally involved in reconciliation is synthesis. I try to talk a lot of dialectical synthesis, meaning an attempt to preserve what’s at the root, the fundamental reasons underlying each position, in a way that what is rejected is not the most significant things, that give rise to the position, but the details, the accidental results of the position itself. Ken Wilber has shaped my views on this in some respects, although I quite fundamentally disagree with the approach he ultimately takes; but there are echoes of his work in my own—what he insists upon for his constructive position is that you don’t preserve the details of anyone’s position, but you preserve the experiences that gave rise to it.

S: The motives.

A.L.: Well, for me it’s the motives. That’s a difference between me and Wilber; for Wilber it’s very much about experiences. That comes out of a radical empiricist epistemology which I think is absolutely and completely untenable – at least in anything like the project Wilber wants to do, of transcending-and-including all different available perspectives. What he wants to say is that everything is coming out of some sort of experience, a replicable experience. In my article about him a couple of years ago, I took on that position and argued no, most of these traditions are not coming out of replicable experiences. But at the same time, what the whole project of looking for those experiences is about, is asking, what’s really important here? That’s what we need to preserve. Not the accretions, but the core and essentials. Not the trappings. Of course, saying that – the much more difficult question is, what is the core, what is the essential, and what is merely trappings? Wilber takes an answer to this which is much too easy, which is that there are some experiences there, but when you replace experience with motives, this is much more helpful.

The trick about “motives” is that that term can mean a number of things – there are instrumental motives, and “motives” held in bad faith – but when we ask what people’s motives are for taking a particular perspective as the truth – and I mean, not mouthing a commitment, but sincerely believing it – then I think we’re much closer to the mark.

S: You've continued to engage Nussbaum since you finished your dissertation, and one of the central concepts you have been elaborating derives from your thinking about her. I'm referring to the "axis" you see between "Ascending" and "Descending" modes of thought. This axis also has clear roots in the work of Ken Wilber. I'll come to Wilber in a moment, but how did you come to draw this particular strand out of Nussbaum's work? My own impression of Nussbaum has been somewhat different, though I hasten to add you have read her more closely than I have. My sense, however, is that Nussbaum clearly champions the mode of "descent" and wishes to downplay a tendency to "ascent" which she considers to have had an over-determining impact upon western thought. You, on the other hand (if I may offer what is bound to be a caricature right off the bat), seem to be concerned to strike a balance and not to over-compensate by too readily valorizing the particular. Do you agree that you are reading Nussbaum to some degree at slightly cross-purposes to her own?

A.L.: Yes. In the dissertation I’m pretty clear about doing that, and my take on ascent and descent is no different. I find Nussbaum’s categories are helpful to think with, partially because they give us a foil; they articulate modern Western common sense in a way that gives me something worth opposing. I think Nussbaum agrees that ascent and descent are real tendencies, and wants to pull us further toward descent. What I want to do is invert that. Not that we should move to a pure ascent but that our society is terribly mired in descent, and needs more of a balance. Wilber used to get this, and agree with it pretty much exactly, in his “Wilber-4” phase. Tragically, in “Wilber-5” he’s become almost as much of a descender as Nussbaum, although I suspect he might not admit it.

S: “Mired in descent?” That’s not the usual critique. I am used to hearing the opposite—that our culture is far too ascent-oriented.

A.L.: Yeah, I think that’s just a crazy thing to say. There’s this endless drumbeat from postmodernists saying that we need to descend evermore into these relativist perspectives that have nothing to do with each other and nothing to do with the truth. Where this typically comes from and comes back to is an obviously self-contradictory position, such as that the truth is that there is no truth. It is kind of a wonder that that view has endured as long as it has.

But the interesting thing is that, while I feel the cultural tide turning away from postmodernism – it doesn’t seem to have the intellectual pull that it used to, and the Speculative Realists have much more energy in “Continental” circles from what I can tell; it seems inevitable that postmodernism was always going to have run its course, the only question was when, and it seems to be happening now – and yet, what’s not changing from postmodernism is this emphasis on descent. I see it very much now in politics. It’s as if we are going back to modernism, the pendulum is swinging again; with the boldness of militant secularism, the New Atheists – Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens – but also more broadly, in the culture, the idea of freedom of religion seems to be something that people are now reconsidering, because of specific instances—take the Hobby Lobby debate, or in Indiana the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. I don’t think that businesses should be allowed to discriminate against gay couples or refuse to offer contraception on the grounds of traditional beliefs, but the fury that greeted the idea that they would be allowed to do these things was something that surprised me. Especially the increasing demonization of people who oppose gay marriage. The idea of what is still called something like a traditional “religious” world view, is something increasingly viewed as evil. There’s almost a Freudian, continual need to kill the father: God is dead and yet we need to keep killing him more. Something our culture needs very much is a better sense of what is universal, what is transcendent – to rise above this endless diversifying of perspectives that can’t talk to each other, can’t understand each other, and don’t want to understand each other.

S: Yeah. The multicultural disintegration into a multitude of voices that can’t help but talk past one another – that chorus is what I think of when I think of the critique I mentioned, that we’re all too ascent-oriented. But there comes a point at which that claim turns out to be addressing the last war, so to speak. Maybe there was a time when we were too ascent-oriented, when, say, Christianity was a monolithic power in the West. I think that hour has long passed.

A.L.: Exactly. Probably the last people that could have made that critique and made it stick were the young Hegelians – Marx’s generation. I think that ever since then, since Marx and Nietzsche, and especially with Heidegger and analytic philosophy, the tide has been sweeping further and further away from ascent. Certainly, if I were writing in medieval Europe, I would say, “guys, we need to look at the particular, we need to descend much more from here” – if I were even allowed to say that, which I probably wouldn’t have been, and that would itself be part of the problem. The world of Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and even more so the Augustinian world which preceded them, was indeed one that really did neglect the world of individual particularity –

S: But the argument became so loud, that we were suffering from this incredible hangover from that – for so much of the twentieth century, this was the constant refrain: we took our cue from Augustine, and look where it got us! But no one looked around, as this complaint was repeated more and more, and said – the fact that I am even able to articulate this argument, indicates that something has shifted.

A.L.: Right.

S: So your point about the incredulity and offense occasioned by disputes about things like gay marriage – that’s interesting to me because it points to the place where these shifts and tendencies really show up. They don’t show up on the level of a rarefied exchange of ideas; they show up on the level of what people actually value. And yes, there’s an argument going on on the level of values, but it’s quite clear what the loudest voices are, and what the base assumptions are – and it’s quite clear what happens when you question those assumptions. I was struck by – I recently read a novel by Owen Barfield, and he asks, with connection to the Lady Chatterly’s Lover trial for obscenity – Why is it that the partisans of brotherly love suddenly become so nasty when you question them?

A.L.: Yes. One of the things I find appealing about MacIntyre is that he looks at liberalism as a tradition – a tradition whose fatal flaw is that it doesn’t see itself as a tradition. Someone I’ve found very helpful – I just re-tweeted a piece by him – is Damon Linker, who articulates a lot of what I’ve been feeling about gay marriage – I am absolutely for it, but I don’t want to demonize the people who are against it. Linker, I think, has a very good handle on these issues. I haven’t really blogged about him yet – I’ve been staying away from questions of “religion and politics” until I’ve thought them through more, partly because – because it is so easy to get shamed, to get demonized if you say the “wrong” thing. At some point I feel I’ll be willing to risk that – to stand up for positions I take to be unpopular – but I want to be sure I have the courage of my own convictions before I do that; when I do, though, I’ll probably write a lot about Linker. He’s someone who used to write for First Things, used to be very much a part of that American right-wing Christian conservative movement, and gradually drifted away from it because he became deeply convinced of the truth of political liberalism, that we really do need to make room for a plurality of perspectives. But, he also says, this applies to people who aren’t liberal in that way. We really do need to allow for freedom of religion. Linker takes this a bit further than I would… the difference is that he thinks this freedom should apply to businesses; where I would say it really should be just to individuals. But there is, in any case, a certain amount of liberalism that I am persuaded by – I’m still working through how much. One of the most explicit things I’ve written on this was a post called Freedom of Choice: A Classical Defense, where I point out: it’s very hard to figure out what the good is, and I think that individuals are typically in the best place to figure this out for themselves. Not because I have any faith in the goodness of their nature as individuals – I don’t – but I have even less faith in the goodness of the human nature of other people, or of the institutions, who would make those decisions for them. People do often make decisions that interfere with their own flourishing; but when large bureaucratic organizations make those decisions for them, that interferes with flourishing even more.

So when someone’s vision of the good is one that says “I do personally disapprove of homosexuality, or contraception”, that’s something we should be able to make some room for. It gets a bit different when they open a business – then it’s no longer just about them, but about the people they’re interacting with, and the people they’re employing especially. That’s one of those places it gets complicated, and there’s a certain amount of judgment I want to reserve. But it’s important that allow space for people to have differing visions of the good, and, to take it back to the ascent-and-descent question, and how prevalent descent is in our society, I think that view is in some jeopardy at this point. Rod Dreher is someone else whose blog I read a lot, and the way he describes the left-wing position, the common cultural liberal position, is to say – correctly, I think – that it holds that “error has no rights.” Which is something the medieval European order would certainly have said: if you reject Jesus Christ, you are wrong, and you do not have a right to an opinion. When you look at the way that someone like Brendan Eich was essentially recently hounded out of his job at Mozilla for privately donating money to a campaign against gay marriage, you see that view—that error has no rights; even when someone is not acting in the capacity as a business with responsibilities to others, but as a private citizen, if they express this “religious” view, there is something deeply wrong with them as a person, and society should shun them, marginalize them, treat them as outcasts.

S: But it gets tricky – we’re not just talking about “views,” we’re talking about visions of practice, proposals for practice. It’s one thing for me to say, I’m opposed to abortion, and a very different thing for me to propose something dispositive for everybody. If I say, I’m opposed to abortion, I do not mean, well, I won’t have one! I mean, it ought not to happen. My proposals are about what should and should not happen at large, not about my own private life. This means that liberalism is inherently complicated, inherently conflicted. And I’m not convinced that liberalism understands this, can theorize it.

A.L.: I think there’s a helpful Buddhist contribution to be made to this whole discussion, though I’m not sure precisely what it is yet. Over the last couple of months I have started identifying as a Buddhist myself in a way I haven’t before; and I do think that the Buddhist take on politics, insofar as one can speak of one, which is of course problematic, is very much an anti-political take. It’s a tradition that tends much more to retreat, or one might better say advance, into monasticism. To say, when giving advice to kings, what you should do is give that kingdom away, renounce it, and become a monk –

S: Hard luck for whoever you hand it off to!

A.L.: Well, that is true, but there is a tradition – I’ve seen some texts that refer to passing possessions, of which kingdoms would be one instance, as a kind of moral hot potato. A lot depends in that case upon how much altruism is considered a part of the path. In Theravāda Buddhism, the person you are handing it to is – there’s a certain real sense in which, that’s their problem. They think it’s a good thing that they’re getting the kingdom, and they’re not on the path to enlightenment in the same way you are, so it becomes their problem to work it out, and that’s OK. You need to work on yourself first. When you get into Mahayāna, and altruism, the questions get a little trickier that way. It ties very closely into questions I was exploring, to some extent in my dissertation and more so in an article on gift-giving I published in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics a year or two ago. To say you’re supposed to give things away because possessions are harmful is one thing, but you’re also supposed to be benefiting people, so why are you giving them these things that are harmful to them? So many of the concrete prescriptions for action in Mahayāna have to come back to the notion of upāya, skillful meanS: what’s particularly appropriate for the situation? There are a lot of affinities here with pragmatism, consequentialism, utilitarianism, but the difference is, what is this being useful for? One could sort of argue that the end is happiness, in both cases, but it’s happiness conceived entirely differently – both as to what leads to it, and as to what constitutes it. In that Mahayāna perspective, one acknowledges the futility of worldly pursuits and external goods, and that suffering comes from craving, ignorance, and anger – and the goal is to get to a state beyond this, both oneself and other people – in Mahayāna, it’s especially for other people – but recognizing the fact that others are on different stages of the path, at different levels. Most people are just very far from even remotely getting this. That being the case, the best thing that you can do is to just get them in a state where they’re going to listen to you, listen to the dharma and those who preach it – and one of the best ways to do that is to give them the stuff they want, even if possessing that stuff is relatively harmful for them. I think the giving away of the kingdom counts as that. The article really goes into this in depth. I think that’s the way this tension ultimately works itself out. In the end, in the Buddhist eschatology, there would be no kingdom and no need for a kingdom. But we’re far enough from that that no one really needs to deal with that implication now – we won’t be getting there for another couple billion years.

S: I have a hard time imagining such a thing – even if Yavanayāna Buddhism were to have an enormous cultural impact, far greater than what it’s had so far, I still have a hard time thinking of what civil society would look like. Would we still need to, I don’t know, provide health care, manage trade?
We will come back to Buddhism, but I want to ask a few preliminary questions first. You are -- would you concur? -- in some sense of the term, a foundationalist: unapologetic in proclaiming philosophy’s need for first principles. Such a stance has not been widely shared in recent decades -- or at least, not among the most visible trends. Was it always obvious to you that the rejection of first principles was a non-starter?

A.L.: No, I can’t say it was always obvious. I used to think of myself as a coherentist, and was fond of the leaky-raft metaphor. I insisted that we have to “start where we are”, not from some absolute Archimedean starting point. What really changed this was reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s wonderful discussion in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry of the distinction between dialectical and demonstrative argument. I think I got this around 2005 or so. A close friend, strongly influenced by James Doull, had tried to push me on this point for a while, but it didn’t click until I saw it in MacIntyre. I realized then that even Descartes, taken as the arch-foundationalist, agrees we need to start where we are – but in a chronological sense, not a logical sense. We have to start where we are but we don’t have to end where we are (or were); we get from where we are to the foundation. Or that’s the idea. And I guess I’m still not 100% sure that I would count myself as a foundationalist. Recently (I posted on this a bunch in 2014) I’ve been thinking with Thomas Kuhn on the topic, that first principles are what constitute paradigms within disciplines, and I think we absolutely need first principles in that respect. What foundationalism in philosophy would involve is a meta-paradigm, a set of first principles for finding first principles. I suspect it would be good to have that; my inclinations at this point are foundationalist. But I hesitate to call myself a foundationalist – yet, at least – because in order to have such foundations I would have to know what they are. And I’m not sure that I do.

S: You have paid some considerable attention to a couple of thinkers who are dismissed by most academics, despite their notoriety and apparent "pop" status. I remember that you once remarked about Ayn Rand that while you did not agree with her, you took her seriously as a thinker and often found that one way of getting purchase on a question was to ask what Rand would make of it. This seemed, and still seems, to me a very good rule: ask yourself what Descartes, or Whitehead, or Žižek would say about such-and-such, and if you can get very far, you probably have advanced your understanding on at least two fronts. It strikes me that this approach – of seeing whether one understands an issue by trying on the perspective of someone else – may come more naturally to an “outsider” – a position you have said you inherited in some degree from your father. Do you think you are predisposed to this?

A.L.: I’m not sure about that. This is a heuristic I have found useful in the past for grappling with new philosophical questions I haven’t thought about before. I think that’s gradually becoming less necessary for me, because after two decades of trying to think philosophically, I think I’ve thought at least a bit about most of the questions; where I still have a lot to learn is about all of the very different possible answers. My choosing of Rand was not arbitrary, though; one of the things that makes her thought stand out to me is its simplicity. Simple thought is typically wrong, but it’s also much easier to think with. I’m not at all sure that asking what Žižek would say about a given topic would be helpful in the same way.

A related heuristic I’ve found useful, this one for getting at the answers, is to ask: “who would disagree with this?” (Rand is again useful for this. Right or wrong, it’s not hard to know where she stands.) What I’ve tend to observe in reading philosophy – and this may be where the outsider tendency manifests itself – is that the times where you probably don’t understand something are the ones where you find yourself thinking “well, I guess that probably makes sense.” To me that suggests you haven’t yet grasped its significance. To understand what an idea is, you need to understand what it isn’t. Determination is negation. Rand is quite good at negating, and therefore, in a sense, at determining.

S: Another thinker to whom you've attended at length, as mentioned, is Ken Wilber. Your ascent/descent axis is clearly derived from your reading of him; and more recently, you wrote a long paper engaging with Wilber's positions and critiquing his take on spiritual tradition. I am curious -- for more than one reason -- what your experience has been of venturing into this arena. First, do you find that the field of "Integral studies," as Wilber has called his approach, suffers from being in some ways cut off from wider academia?

A.L.: Yes, absolutely. Wilber himself lacks the rigour that comes from engaging with serious opponents. It’s clear that he considers serious disagreement from other people in his cultural milieu – postmodernists, Yavanayāna Buddhists. But he doesn’t seem to have even considered the conservative critiques from an Alasdair MacIntyre, or the historical critiques of his brand of mysticism (the topic of the paper), or just about anything in analytical ethics.

S: Were you able to get valuable feedback from others in Wilber's "camp" who you felt had taken you seriously?

A.L.: Yes, again. I got two great peer reviews from Wilberians which changed my understanding about him a lot. Up until then I hadn’t realized just what a change the move from Wilber-4 to Wilber-5 was.

S: And what do you think mainstream religious and philosophical scholars and thinkers have to gain by engaging with Wilber?

A.L.: Above all I think it’s a sense of the bigger picture, going beyond their own specialty. Academia these days insists that your work be (a) new and original and (b) rigorous and defensible, and (c) a massive volume of it in a short time. That basically requires nitpicking: you have to go in and find an area of interest so small that nobody’s found it worth studying before. And so everyone gets focused on their tiny little corner of reality and neglects the big picture. Wilber is the opposite, and that’s why I’ve turned to him so much. Wilber helps us think about the significance of the little things academics study, why they would matter. I think he gets the big picture wrong (and he does so in large part because of his lack of attention to academic detail), but the bare fact that he tries (and tries hard) to get it at all is something sorely lacking from contemporary academia.

S: You mentioned James Doull -- a significant Canadian scholar and thinker whose (posthumous) book Philosophy and Freedom blends depth and erudition to a cumulative effect that is daunting and inspiring. Doull seems to be much less well-known outside of Canada – is that your impression? I take it you studied for a time with one of Doull's students? Did this Hegelianism take you by storm, or did it slowly percolate in you?

A.L.: “Studied” is not exactly the right word, nor is “Doull’s students”. My oldest and dearest friend – we met in the 1970s, though neither of us is yet 40 – had his intellectual formation at King’s College in Halifax, in a program largely founded by Doull and carried on by Doull’s students. If he ever met Doull it wasn’t more than once or twice; really he was Doull’s grand-pupil. But that Doullian Hegelianism he encountered definitely took him by storm, and he became one of the most orthodox Doullians there is – other students in the program have commented to me on occasion that they’re not as deeply immersed in it as he is. As for me, I reacted quite negatively to the ideas he was learning at first; they took a lot longer to percolate.

S: Have you been similarly impressed – I ask because I assume that, as a Canadian, you encountered his work – by George Grant?

A.L.: No, or at least not yet. What I’ve read of Grant so far has been interesting, but not nearly in the same league as Doull. Grant is perhaps most interesting to me as part of a more general movement of Canadian Hegelianism, best known in Charles Taylor but having deep roots going back to John Watson (who lived and taught in my home town). That’s something I hope to learn a lot more about.

S: My impression is that your encounters with Doull were important in part because, beyond introducing you to Hegel, they nurtured in you, or gave you some vocabulary, for what would later be a budding small-c conservativism -- a tendency you have referred to as being "saved from politics." I am reminded that Plato cautions against the attempts of philosophers to engage with politics, not least because it will consume all their time. Randall Collins in The Sociology of Philosophies -- another really significant (and seemingly neglected) book that you have attended to -- describes a dynamic that you have commented upon: "innovation through conservativism," and a very strong feature of your work, which appeals to me as getting to the heart of philosophy per se, is your read of this general tendency as pre-modern, and thus not merely a reaction to the upheavals of the last century and a half. (You point out, for instance, that Sankara can persuasively be read as engaging in just such conservative innovation.) This strikes me as important because it is all too easy to critique conservativism as reactionary through and through, and moreover as an accomplice (witting or no) to the status quo powers that be. Does this accord with your own understanding?

A.L.: My understanding of this is quite different. There are three different tendencies that I think you’re running together here, each of which is something of a regular buzzword of mine: “literal conservatism”, “innovation through conservatism”, and “being saved from politics”. (The latter I more commonly describe as “anti-politics”, but the “saved” formulation has tended to resonate more with people, and I’m happy with that.) But I intend them each as very different from each other. The first one tends to endorse the status quo and the second to endorse some sort of return to what was before the status quo (it could be called “reactionary”). I should add that I don’t see the status quo as necessarily bad; indeed I think the heart and the point of literal conservatism is the idea that the status quo is good, at least when compared to likely alternatives. But both of these conservatisms can easily advocate active engagement in politics as essential (one might think of Burke’s “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”). I would probably read Doull as innovation through conservatism and Hegel as a literal conservative late in life, but probably as neither in his youth.

Neither of them, though, has anything to do in my mind with being saved from politics. Quite the opposite. This is actually probably my single biggest objection to Hegel (and likewise Doull): he makes the good a fundamentally political matter. (He once said something like “the morning newspaper is our religion”.) I find that extremely problematic. Being saved from politics is something I derive entirely from my other side, from Buddhism. I’ve written a number of times on the blog about how Śāntideva explicitly warns us to avoid political engagement, but Buddhist anti-politics was something I’d already encountered reading about Buddhism in Thailand. I reacted strongly against that anti-politics when I first encountered it there, but it definitely stayed with me, and became absolutely essential to me during the GWB years. I am very thankful that I found this in Buddhism, because I would never have got it from Hegel (or Doull).

As for both variants of conservatism, I should add that I keep them at a certain arm’s length. I have learned from both and sometimes identify as a conservative (though never as a right-winger!) But even that is always with caution and trepidation – there is a significant amount I think is missing from both.

* * *

(The second half of this interview will appear next week is up here. Comments on both halves are welcome.)

Upcoming, ongoing

I want to thank everyone for the many kind messages I’ve received while recovering from my operation. It was a longer process than I’d anticipated, but I think I am now back to the old New Normal.

I've posted nothing this month while I’ve been convalescing, but several projects are going on behind the scenes. I am nearing the final stages of co-editing a book, which will appear later this year. I am compelled to be quite painstaking because much of the proofing falls to me, and the papers included in it are heavy with numbers. I feel certain that some infelicity will slip through the cracks, and I comfort myself with the realization that my old mentor Ernest McClain, in whose honor the book will appear in memoriam, was continually finding little mistakes in his own work after the fact, and cheerfully acknowledging them and moving on. The book is currently expected to be called Music and Deep Memory: Speculations in Mathematics, Tuning, and Tradition.

More proximately, I will soon be posting here the first of what I plan to be a series of interviews with thinkers, educators, scholars. The art of the interview is a new one for me, and I’ve been learning as I go. These will appear irregularly here, but the participation I have had so far has been extremely gratifying, and has given me much to think about. The interview isn’t quite a “dialogue” in the old sense, because to some degree it aims to be expository as well as exploratory, but there is a give-and-take in the encounter which is its own interesting rhythm. It is not as simple as coming up with a list of questions and their answers. A good question yields more than some information; it discloses a new and interesting direction. I’m discovering that I don’t always know which questions will turn out to be good ones.

The two activities – the book editing, and the interviews – are interesting in themselves, but especially in their sharp contrast with each other, they are mutually illuminating. In editing, I’m concerned above all to keep the channel clean – to make sure nothing, least of all me, gets in the way of someone else’s presentation. I need to have a sense of what the author is saying in order to grasp whether it’s being said well, and accurately. But “being said well” is a tricky category, and I am continually reminding myself not to impose my own tastes. I have a baseline security and facility in the conventions of the discursive community, into which I render the content, but I am extremely careful about not interfering.

In an interview, on the other hand, I most certainly am interfering; the whole thing is occasioned by my "interference." I interrupt, I press again, I go on a long detour or ask the almost too-blunt question. It's an interference that needs to be finely calibrated to facilitate the presentation; and, in fact, my ability to “interfere” adeptly, requires my willingness to be interfered with. To ask good questions, you need a good sense of what is at stake, what could change for you. And even more than that, a willingness to grant that you might have to change. And yet, you aren't sitting at the feet of a guru asking questions for your own enlightenment; there is a place you are asking questions from, a kind of "baseline security" with one's own positions (including one's own uncertainties), which is equally indispensable.

I've frequently said that philosophy is inherently dialogical, and appealed to the work of Bakhtin, Levinas, and Wittgenstein, among others for support (to say nothing of the example of Plato). This is designedly in express contrast to the assertions of Žižek, for instance, when he says that philosophers eschew "discussion". I think I know what he means when he says this; he is (I take it) distancing himself from a kind of liberal, pragmatic model in which conversation and endless pointless roundtable opinion-sharing is the norm. And of course the thinker does require long periods of uninterrupted time, time alone, in quiet, in meditation, in reverie. All those long walks of Kant; all that staring-into-space of Socrates. But these two experiences of editing and interviewing have reminded me that encounter is itself a process, and not an innocent or uncomplicated one. There are all sorts of permutations of dialogue and collaboration, fraught with their attendant rituals and mores and ways of being brought off felicitously – or not. These norms are there in ordinary conversation (and they are not always the same from conversation to conversation). But it is striking how many of these norms emerge when the project is one of developing a text.

Unrepeatable experiment

I go in today for a medical "procedure" (people seem to not use the word surgery as much now) which will, it is hoped, deliver me from the on-again, off-again agony of kidney stones. There's not much to be said about the pain itself. It's quite unmistakable; brings on a kind of nausea; and though it comes and goes, while it lasts it is intense to the point of being un-ignorable -- every other act of attention is (at best) soured by it. But what I want to register here is a few thoughts that I literally will not be able to think with the same clarity after I wake up from anaesthesia. That's because the thoughts are all about going in.

Once many years ago, before cell phones, I went to the airport to meet my girlfriend getting home from a business trip. The flight arrived, the passengers disembarked, and then a few more trickled off, and then the flight attendants... but not her. Sitting there, wondering what could have happened, trying not to assume the worst, I slipped into a kind of meta-rumination on my worry. That was the first time it occurred to me that there are some affective states that it's very hard to get into on purpose. In the days that followed, after everything had been resolved and she came in on a flight the next day, I kept returning to this discovery: "Wondering what happened," being brought up short by circumstance, is a state that befalls you. You can't intentionally bring it about; you have to be caught by it unawares. That's the very nature of the state in question.

There are other such states. Humility is a good example: very, very hard to intentionally, directly bring about, one nonetheless can cultivate a propensity for it indirectly. Humility is a kind of side-effect. In humility's case, it's even difficult to reflect upon it without dissolving it. Many spiritual writers warn that even noticing one's own humility undercuts it.

Another such state, and one that holds up more robustly under reflection, is really expecting that one will die. The impossibilities here are somewhat different. There are a few ways you could go about really triggering this in yourself; but usually, those bring about death itself, so the benefit of reflecting on it is somewhat diminished. But sometimes, one's life seems to round a corner and you find yourself facing a cliff-edge.

This has been my state for about a week and a half. It doesn't matter that "going to die" is an absurd overstatement of any coolly-evaluated likelihood in my case. I know what the statistics say; I have heard (and I believe) my doctors' reassurances (no cardio-pulmonary red flags, I'm well outside of the age range that gives doctors cause to worry, etc etc.) Trouble is: it isn't my intellect that's worried. I am going into an experience that is new (to me): general anaesthesia. Having no experiential landmarks, my emotions don't know what to do. In short, I'm scared. Not panicked, not petrified; but I have somehow locked onto a fixation that I can only with great patience and care turn my attention from.

Now, I don't mean here that my intellect and my emotions are responding differently to the same data. That may be what's happening, but that's not how it feels, and how it feels is all I'm dealing with here. To say that, while I intellectually "know" with reasonable security that I'll make it through anaesthesia just fine, this information hasn't got through to my limbic system, is no doubt relevant, but what I'm talking about is somewhat different. It's rather that with my emotions, I am processing a different data set than my intellect is. My intellect has evaluated the risks and benefits of a specific course of action. But this same situation has made my emotions -- or perhaps my intuition -- much more keenly aware of "what's really always there," as Philip Larkin put it:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now.

Indeed, I'm not even sure it is my emotions that are chiefly involved. It's like a narrative sense -- I can just see how, if my life did end today, it would make a kind of rounded whole (for all that would be left undone). And under the pressure of the attendant emotions, that sense can loom up into a vision that crowds other stories aside.

I'm not concerned with the "reasonableness" of these feelings. Let us stipulate that, by some lights, they are unreasonable. But I want to note what it's like to have them. This is hard to put into words because, as I say, it isn't primarily my discursive function that is involved. It's more the color of everything. It's not quite that I am irrationally "sure" I will die on the operating table; it's rather that my first sense of anything, what I lead with in any given encounter, is of a kind of quiet poignancy flanked on one side by anxiety, and on the other by a sort of feeling game -- a kind of curiosity to see what's up, even if what's before me is colored by long familiarity. All my small superstitions swarm to whisper into my ear: what if this is -- is this -- the last time I'll walk down this street? Sit in this café? Speak to this co-worker, this fellow parishioner, this friend?

To be clear: I have lots of plans for upcoming weeks and months, things I expect to do and look forward to doing. But alongside this rational assessment of the situation, there's also a kind of third-person view from outside myself, as if I were seeing a film about someone else and knowing, as they don't, what's coming up in the second half.

I'm not continually thinking about death. I'm not "taking leave" all the time (though I have made a few phone calls, sent some emails, and been a little more mindful of saying the important things to people). I am not,alas, much less prone to being unkind or thoughtless or selfish. I'm just as distractable by a sexy passerby or a catchy bit of music. But behind or beside all of that is a strong sense of it being fragile, and also here now.

I suppose I do already reflect upon death more than many I know. (Not all.) This isn't morbidity, and I won't waste time defending it; that would be a different post. It's part of my avocation; I am more with Montaigne ("to study philosophy is to learn to die") than with Spinoza ("the free man thinks on nothing so little as death"), though a full teasing-out of the tensions and secret alliances between these two thoughts would be still another post -- yet one more of the projects I am putting off. My thoughts and my feelings as I approach this new experience are surely colored by my practice up to now. God willing, this will prove to be a practice run for the real thing; and I will be able to take to heart what I have learned, which is: even "believing" that I'm going to die doesn't make me behave as differently as I would have thought.

I've become more aware of all my habits, of how ingrained they are, even in the face of this (imaginary, but very keenly imagined) upcoming deadline. I still waste time; I still function on autopilot. Doubtless, one response to this might be: just shows that you aren't really convinced. And of course I do not know that this is how I would feel if I received a grim six-months-to-live diagnosis, or if I were facing a firing squad in the morning. But it also seems to me to show that this is really how I live all the time, since my mortality is "really always there", and I "know" that nothing guarantees that I won't die in a traffic collision or from an unguessed blot clot on the way to the hospital.

This has made the idea of karma all the more real for me; the notion that the accumulated inertia and trajectories of a lifetime are very likely to keep going and may well determine one's "next life" just as they have determined much of this one, makes a kind of intuitive sense now in a way it did not before, for all my on-again off-again baby-step zazen I've done over the years. I'm not arguing for rebirth here, I'm merely asserting that the feeling of karma has gained more experiential traction for me in the last couple of weeks. The need for frequent confession, often urged by some Roman Catholics, among others, has never seemed so obvious to me. This is not a matter of morbidly dwelling on some kind of unbeatable perverse force in oneself, or spiritual chemotherapy for the dreaded gomboo. It's the cultivation of reflection and consciousness of how vast is the gulf between what we say and what we do; and, importantly, a cultivation whose terms we do not set ourselves. To go into the theology of Confession would be far beyond my point here (one more post, again...); but I see very clearly, not from any huge burden of sins, but rather from a clearer recognition of sin, just how wise are the words of the prayer-book to which my meditation these days keeps turning:

From dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord deliver us.

I won't be able to see this in quite the same way when I come out of anaesthesia; this post will be unwriteable then. My irrational feeling will have been proven irrational, and anxiety about death will resume its ordinary shape and size against a horizon assumed to be far distant. But I hope I will have internalized something of a deeper resolution to reflect on what I don't know about my death, and what I do, beyond doubt.

*

Post-op Addendum, next day:

Thank you too all who kept (and keep) me in heart, mind, and prayer, and who wrote me on- and off-blog. Notwithstanding the stent which temporarily runs from kidney to bladder, I seem not to have moved on to Purgatory yet. Already my apprehension of the future has shifted to the vague middle-distance, confirming that I was right to capture these reflections while I could. There will be follow-up in the next while, once I can operate a computer again without supervision.

Rights and reasons

Excellent post up at Love of All Wisdom, where Amod Lele writes about the problem with the notion of human rights -- to wit, that although many people agree broadly on what human rights are, no one can really say what makes a right a right.

Lele's example is the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and he quotes Jacques Maritain's remark that in the absence of deep philosophical concord, no agreement about the principles that give rise to rights can be reached; only "agreement on a joint declaration is possible, given an approach pragmatic rather than theoretical..."

This point fits into a broader critique often made by thinkers like Leo Strauss, James Doull, Carl Schmitt, Alasdair MacIntyre, and so on (MacIntyre being one one of Lele's star witnesses later on in his post)-- to wit, that the modern, liberal consensus (such as it is) can offer no rationale for its own intuitions, but only a pragmatic shrug of "seems-to-work-OK-so-far." Many of these figures are seen as conservative, and the critique is not infrequently suspected of being a move in a crypto-reactionary campaign. (This is of course question-begging, since even if some nostalgic course were recommended -- and it almost never is -- it would still be an open question whether it had motivated the argument, or vice-versa.)

Doull noted this wryly:

To ask about the origin and foundation of what has been, one may say, for a century and a half an ever more fixed and settle dogma is not without difficulty. It may appear to be only an antiquarian inquiry, curious but without practical interest, or else, what is thought intolerable, to recommend a return to the institutions and beliefs of an unliberated age. But the necessity can no longer be disregarded: it becomes always more deeply felt that this contemporary society can give no account of its principle assumption, of the confidence which once animated the democratic and social revolutions.^*

But the criticism can be launched from the left as well; a large part of the urgency of Badiou's thought comes from his addressing the bankruptcy of the left-liberal consensus. It is evident that this consensus typically slides towards relativism (which is why conservatives frequently get some traction out of alleging that it can offer no coherent case against stoning heretics, female gential mutilation, foot-binding, and so on); also that it winds up unable to mount any significant resistance to capitalism -- which is what made plausible the infamous mantra "There is No Alternative." This impotence in the face of "market forces" is precisely why ostensibly "socially liberal" values are currently ascendant even as the rapaciousness of business and industry run unchecked: in both cases, the driving forces are advertising and profit. This is the cynical, shadow-side of pragmatism. I do not believe in cheap gotcha's, but I am struck by the fact that when William James offered a rough-and-ready pragmatist account of truth, his succinct phrase for it was an idea's "cash value."

It is instructive to compare the inability to say "Why" about rights to Euthyphro's stammering about piety. In each instance, a set of cultural mores that seemed OK-so-far suddenly reveals itself as having run its course in a way. Philosophy is the wresting of insight, beyond articulation, from the ruins of this stammering; but it must needs first make the inarticulation more, not less, obvious -- and so, painful. Rorty, with whom one strain of pragmatism culminates, advocated being pragmatically satisfied with not having answers. Since talk about rights seems to "work," hankering after a reason why is a pointless maneuver, he thought; a form of nostalgia for privilege, every bit as as suspect as longing for the bad old days when "everyone knew their place." This ploy of Rorty's amounts to a sort of changing the subject. I actually think is an interesting move, but what prevents it from being definitive is that the subject can always change back. Rorty wanted the question of why to become boring. I don't think that will happen.

^*Doull, "The Christian Origin of Contemporary Institutions." Part II. In Dionysius vol VIII, Dec 1984. p53

(Re-post) For the feast day of blessed Fred Rogers

(I posted this two years ago. I've amended the year-count (it was the tenth anniversary of Rogers' death when I first posted it) but otherwise left it untouched. I don't tend to re-post things -- in fact, I've never done so before -- but, well, I really, really mean this. The Communion of Saints is like any community on Earth -- there are some in it to whom you feel especially close. (Doubtless this is "wrong" in the long run, but in the short run it can be the occasion of getting us to the long run.) Fred Rogers is one for whom I feel especial devotion.

*

Today is the twelfth anniversary of the death of Fred Rogers, yes that Fred Rogers, and in my own devotions, it is a Holy Day.

I have been working on a post off-and-on for a year to note this day, and by an accident of the internet, some mistake of mine has intersected with the design flaws of Blogger, and the post is gone. Solid weeks of work. The kind of thing that reduces me to helpless, indignant, this-is-not-acceptable spluttering egotism in the face of the indifferent state of affairs. Well, what would Mister Rogers do?

Start over, of course.

And so. This is not the post I wrote before. I'm going to state the case baldly: Fred Rogers was, I frankly and un-ironically maintain, a Saint in the technical theological sense. (Christianity is the tradition I stand in, as it was Rogers', but feel free to substitute "Tzadik" or "Bodhisattva" or "Really really good person", and forgive me the inexactitude of these comparisons for now.) The main entry in the hagiography is a justly famous article by Tom Junod, first published in Esquire. (This is essential reading. If you haven't read it, go do that now.) I have little to add to it; all my impressions of Rogers come via his children's television show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, whose surreal and simple vision differs from that of nearly every other children's show in that it had no two-tiered audience strategy, no eye winking at the adults over the kids' heads. This (and Rogers' unobtrusive ahimsa) set it apart from Looney Tunes, from Disney, from Rocky & Bullwinkle, even from Sesame Street, whose mutations have proven it to be a bellwether of liberal culture. With Mister Rogers, you never graduated to the Oooh-I-get-the-joke level. He was entirely (and this was what made him so increasingly aberrant in the age of ironism) sincere, to use a word that is easily said and not easily attained. What you saw on television was, by all accounts, what you met if you shook his hand. He had no TV persona.

Anecdotes of his unassuming, ordinary, jaw-dropping goodness are plentiful. They are easy to yawn at if that's the way your jaw drops. Many of them are unverifiable. But, because of the aforementioned lack of persona, they're pretty much superfluous. They all exemplify one trait, over and over; Rogers was indefatigably interested in everything, and in particular in other people.

Rogers' lack of pretense went hand-in-hand with his mastery of pretending. Pretending, or "make-believe," was Rogers' general term of art for a certain joyful and indirect self-teaching. There was nothing undisciplined about it, and nothing manipulative. If you forget everything you know about Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe, the surrealism of it will astound you. An enormous mantelpiece clock is inhabited by a gentle, young tiger-cub. In a "Museum-go-'round," which is exactly what it sounds like, lives a semi-curmudgeonly woman curator who may, in a fit of pique, use her magical boomerang to invert the whole world. Many inhabitants are named with puns: the neighborhood is ruled, from a powder-blue castle, by King Friday XIII; an ingenious rodent named Cornflake S. Pecially lives in a factory next door; an indeterminate distance off, in "Someplace Else," a donkey ("Hodey") lives in a windmill. We are closer to The Wind in the Willows or the Hundred-Acre Wood (think of Piglet's grandfather, Trespassers W., whose name adorns a broken sign in front of Piglet's house), than we are to Sesame Street or The Electric Company. Among the human beings who live here are a jack-of-all-trades, a chef, and the crush of my young life, "Lady" Betty Aberlin. What strikes you when you stop taking it for granted is how weird it all is -- but without that terrifying undertone that affects, say, Alice in Wonderland, or PeeWee's Playhouse. You get here on a mysterious trolley car (with whom characters regularly converse, easily comprehending its back-&-forth dance on the tracks and its whistles). You can make calls from a telephone booth which occasionally descends out of the sky and then re-ascends. When an extraterrestrial Purple Panda, visiting from vast distances, breaks one of the rules of his home-world by sitting in a rocking chair (!?), how do his fellow-aliens, the indistinguishable Paul and Pauline, point out his error? Why, by chanting: "Sixteen! Sixteen!" Which makes all the sense in the world, right?

All these characters are shown having the ordinary kinds of relationships that obtain between people who usually get along and sometimes don't. They visit each other, surprise each other, get in arguments, work things out. They plan and execute long-term projects -- no less than thirteen full-scale short operas were put on by these characters, with episodes devoted to writing, planning, practicing, and performing them. (Rogers, who had a degree in music, composed them.) In short, the Neighborhood of Make-Believe is a consistent secondary world, and because it is richly imagined and coherent, it retains its pertinence to the world the child lives in, without ever becoming just a pedagogical annex to it.

This is important, because Rogers took very seriously his responsibility to children in a way almost unparalleled, without ever talking down to them and without trying, per impossible, to erase his adulthood. He was, after all, Mister Rogers, not "Fred." With this authority, he was able to assure children they could not go down the drain; with his childlike awe, on the other hand, he was able to see and absolutely respect the need for that assurance. This need arises in many other contexts, which can give the best-intentioned adults a deer-in-headlights stare. Rogers dealt with divorce, death, poverty, war, and disability, with the same calm and open gravity he brings to the going-down-the-drain conversation.

The world is not always a kind place. That's something all children learn for themselves, whether we want them to or not, but it's something they really need our help to understand.

Rogers' way of helping is marked by his complete lack of condescension. I have spent many years working with children and teens, and I have seen many teachers. I can testify that this lack of condescension is the mark of a past master. Rogers attained it because he was unfailingly himself, and refused to be embarrassed into a false, teacherly front:

The best teacher in the world is somebody who loves what he or she does and just loves it in front of you,

Not that I live up to it, but this pretty much sums up my pedagogy, with all due weight on understanding the word love.

This is where Rogers is usually caricatured, to say nothing of being blamed for fostering an "entitled" generation. As to blame, I can only pity those who argue this way, as if concern for children's self-esteem meant unhinging them from responsibility. But the caricature is worth dwelling on for a moment. "You are special," he would tell each person he encountered, young or old, for the first or the hundredth time. He ended each episode that way: "You always make my day a special day for me. You know how? By just your being you." If there was ever an easy target, this was it. The whole thing cried out to be mocked, and it was mocked. (Rogers could appreciate parody; he sought out Eddie Murphy to tell him he had laughed at Murphy's parody "Mr Robinson's Neighborhood" on Saturday Night Live.) "Special," people would roll their eyes. "And how is everyone 'special'?" Yes, yes, you are a unique snowflake. The easy flippancy of this argument is misplaced. Rogers, who had a degree in theology as well as in music, knew very well the paradoxes of particularity. The content of his show is unfailingly intelligent. One could recast this notion of specificity in language more intellectual or more technical, but not more sophisticated. It bears mention that Rogers in saying this to children was carrying on a tradition of sorts: his grandfather had told him this every day. This is not cant, not ideology, but practice. Rogers' doctrine of special-ness is the same as is found in Hopkins:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

This poem of course goes on to invoke Christ, playing "in ten thousand places / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his," and Rogers certainly would have invoked Christ under certain circumstances. On his show, I think he did not so much as say the word "God," but a liturgist's precision informs everything (the music, the sneakers, the sweater, every time). For a look into Rogers' spirituality one must read the Junod article, or the briefer notice Junod wrote upon Rogers' death, or this essay by Margaret Mary Kimmel and Mark Collins, which includes a number of details from Rogers' early years. I call these entries in a "hagiography," and with a straight face, not because I think Rogers was without faults or because I want to create a myth of the perfect man, but simply because there's an obvious sense in which we need categories like "Saint" for certain people who vastly exceed -- to the point of provoking either our derision or our tears -- our sense of what good is humanly available. Hagiography has always attracted myths, and Rogers has his share. (He did not serve in the military, and his long sleeves covered no tattoos, no needle tracks.) Nearly all of the unverifiable anecdotes boil down to the same thing: Rogers gave people an experiential glimpse of their worth -- or, in Rogers' language, they felt special. It was not a passing emotional high; Rogers made people feel special because he regarded them as special, and this regard was not a mantra he repeated to himself but a practice he lived. He continued to be in touch for years with viewers who wrote fan letters, with reporters who found they had told him more about themselves than vice-versa, with people with whom he had chance encounters. You can see the powerful impression Rogers had on people unfold in real time if you watch his acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award. He says almost nothing, and what he says is not about him. Always calmly aware of the pernicious potential of television to alarm, overstimulate, or turn viewers into passive receptors, he quietly subverts the occasion of his award to call for ten pregnant seconds of broadcast silence -- and directs his listeners' attention to other people, people who will receive no award, whose name will not be televised, who will never have fame for any fraction of fifteen minutes, but by whose ordinary goodness have "loved us into being." It is a phrase as rife with philosophical import as any in the canon.

It may seem incongruous for a philosophy blog to have spent this much effort on the host of a children's television show. I hope that Rogers' pedagogy, his personalism, and his ingenious facility at navigating the border between worlds -- what he called pretending, what I would compare with metalepsis -- serves as some clarification for why I think Rogers germane. But the reasons go deeper. For, if philosophy means "love of wisdom" in any sense deeper than the merely etymological, it behooves philosophers to pay heed to an exemplar of wise love.

O God, Who dost exhort all to especial care of Thy little children, and didst grant to thy servant Fredrick Rogers the vision of the unmatched worth of every soul, making him a bearer of the knowledge of this love, grant us to know ourselves wholly precious in Thy sight, and to bear to each of Thy children witness of this joyful surety, by the grace of Thy Son Jesus Christ, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Spirit, now and forever, Amen.

Eric Voegelin at 114

Today is the birthday of Eric Voegelin, who was born on this date in 1901 in Cologne, Germany. A member of the great generation of German-language scholars who left Europe in the '30s in the face of the Nazi rise to power, Voegelin was thinker of remarkable breadth and depth, who turned his formidable learning and extremely hard-working curiosity to the task of understanding the deep metaphysical roots of the political ruin that had overtaken the West in fascism and Bolshevism. If he remains under-read today by philosophers who should know better, it is partly because his work was adopted by the political right. This infatuation on the part of the conservative movement was fairly tepidly returned. William F. Buckley Jr. offered Voegelin a monthly column at The National Review, only to be turned down; and Voegelin consistently declined to be associated with American conservativism, although occasionally an article by him would appear in a right-leaning publication. When the historian George H. Nash, wrapping up work on his book The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (published 1976), wrote to Voeglin requesting a photograph to include, Voegelin wrote back: "Just because I am not stupid enough to be a liberal, does not mean that I am stupid enough to be a conservative." Nonetheless, the net effect was still that the academic left had, and still has, little interest in him, if they have even heard of him. (There is no article on Voegelin at the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, although he gets some mentions in various other articles; his name seems not to occur anywhere in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at all.) An equally plausible rationale for this neglect would seem to be Voegelin's idiosyncratic vocabulary; particularly in the works of his final two decades, Voegelin made a terminology for his project that, while not quite a jargon, nonetheless walks the line between an arsenal of terms of art and an etymological curiosity cabinet. Phrases suchas "metastatic faith," "luminosity of being," "egophanic history," and (one of my favorites, as you might imagine), "metaleptic consciousness," appear without notice or explanation; the reader is expected to rise to the occasion, which is an act of either great trust or tremendous presumption on Voeglin's part. They can be bewildering at first; but it must be said that, if one is willing to start at the beginning, re-read when one doesn't understand, and go deliberately, the terms usually open up and Voegelin's project becomes comprehensible. (And, just in case, the editors of Voegelin's Collected Works have included a glossary in the last volume.)

My own reading of Voegelin is doubtless as off-center as that of all my other "influences." I happened to read him early, mainly by chance -- his volume Anamnesis was in the public library. This central volume to his work is a really strange and wonderful book. It begins in an autobiographical vein, weaving his philosophical concerns together with an account of how they arose for him (his learning of Hebrew and Greek; his study of Husserl with Alfred Schuetz; and so on), and then goes even further back: the third chapter is entirely made up of vignettes from his early childhood: the old seamstress who told him about paradise; the time he was laughed at for predicting rain because the steamboats by the docks had made great quantities of clouds. Only then does he cast his net wider, giving explorations of nature and reason, political reality, language and consciousness. What is Voegelin doing? He is wrestling with the great problem of historicism, which had come to preoccupy so much of German scholarship, and he is wrestling it down to the fundamental unit in which it is encountered: the experience of the human individual.

The best short summary (at least, the best I can come up with) of Voegelin's project -- though not one that I presume he ever considered himself -- frames it in terms of the famous debate between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos in 1929. Heidegger had in some sense "won" (or at least had been judged as having won by the younger generation), by going "back" behind Cassirer's philosophy of culture to the unsettling ground of all of Dasein's works. His gaze was towards the origin, uncanny and dark; Cassirer's meanwhile is upon the positive project and achievement that has emerged. We could gloss this, at considerable risk of oversimplification, as the difference between nothing and something.

Voegelin is almost alone in both taking seriously the problem Heidegger has named, and also in really seeing the agreement that Cassirer maintained -- over Heidegger's indifference -- was there between them. (Another who saw this point, at least in practice, was Hannah Arendt.) Voegelin's concern, all throughout his career, is the tracing of how the "symbols" (his word, but clearly resonant with Cassirer's "philosophy of symbolic forms") emerge in the tension between consciousness and its ground, its being situated always in the "metaxy," the middle -- not at the beginning, not at the end; and how these symbols suffice and then fail, because this work is unfinished by definition (this is part of what being in the middle means), but also often because symbols get reified and set into would-be-permanent systems. Voegelin was especially interested in the way a healthy cultural life could live in its symbols without rigidity, continually open to the luminosity of being; but he spent a great deal of energy on those unhealthy systems which had, he said, erected a "second reality" that fundamentally deformed consciousness if it tried to live within them. Voegelin's word for all these systems is gnostic, and it is this characterization -- first set forth in The New Science of Politics -- for which he is most famous. (It has also come under scrutiny and critique, as the scholarship on gnosticism has continued since Voegelin wrote.)

Voegelin can seem an unabashedly religious thinker, but he does not obviously belong to any sect. He sometimes called himself a "pre-Nicene Christian," and he declined to apologize for any particular confession; moreover he writes with as great sympathy of Israelite prophets, Chinese historians, Egyptian poets, as he does of Christian theologians or saints. The only figures for whom he clearly has little sympathy are the "gnostics" -- but by this term, Voegelin might have meant Valentinus, or Joachim of Fiore, or Auguste Comte. (Even for certain "gnostics," Voegelin retains an ambivalent respect, especially for Hegel, a figure who epitomizes for Voegelin the modern turning-away from reality, but whose intellectual power he clearly acknowledges with respect.) Voegelin's problems are not primarily theological, and certainly not specific to a particular scriptural tradition; they are those of a thinker engaged with transcendence. Here is the another reason why Voegelin's star is so deeply eclipsed at the present time. No thinker of the twentieth century was so uncompromising in his insistence that the turning away from transcendence was a philosophical disaster. Voegelin was very conversant with the theologians; he cites Barth, von Balthasar, de Lubac, and others; but his argument was not theirs.

"Gnosticism" means, for Voegelin, a hankering for certainty. He sees it in fascism and in Marxism; he sees it in the overweening confidence of Hegel (which Marx inherited despite himself, and which Kierkegaard mocked). It is an attempt to bring about permanently in this world, here-and-now, a vision of meaning and understanding that can only happen fleetingly and is anticipated by Biblical faith beyond the horizon of the world. The desire to stage it within the world, Voegelin dubbed the attempt to "immanentize the eschaton." Of all the aforementioned special vocabulary, this is undoubtedly the most famous instance; it entered the general intellectual arsenal of American conservativism in the 50's, and thence into the counter-culture through Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's monumental spoof of paranoid style, the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Wilson and Shea glossed it, with facetious literalness, as "trying to bring the end of the world closer;" but to Voegelin it meant trying to instantiate within history what could only be realized with the abolition of history.

He traced this hankering back via Joachim of Fiore (whose "three stages of history" corresponding to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost Voegelin saw as recapitulated over and over in the historicist schemes of Comte, Schelling, Marx, and even Husserl); he traced it all the way to the gnostics of Irenaus' diatribe. This was not in itself an novel move, as Voegelin was at pains to point out; Hegel had been seen as a gnostic even by his contemporaries. But Voegelin was astonishing in the tenacity with which he tracked this tendency down; and even more remarkable in the cause to which he attributed it. What could have occasioned such a drive to certainty, he asked? And he answered: obviously, Christianity itself.

Certainties, now, are in demand for the purpose of overcoming uncertainties with their accompaniment of anxiety; and the next question would be: What specific uncertainty was so disturbing that it had to be overcome by the dubious means of fallacious immanentization? One does not have to look far afield for an answer. Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. The feeling of security in a "world full of gods" is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is de-divinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Hebrews 11:1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. Ontologically, the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epistemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith. The bond is tenuous, indeed, and it may snap easily.(The New Science of Politics p. 122-123)

It seems to me that this account is more remarkable than anyone -- either Voegelin's critics or his partisans -- has yet accepted. It is of course not uncommon -- it was to become all too common in the years after Voegelin wrote this -- to trace to Christianity's door some catastrophic loss of meaning, a great draining-away of pagan joi de vivre. This too was not a novel move; it had long been suspected, on both sides of the argument, that the falling-silent of the oracles had something to do with the ascendancy of the cross -- something deeper than the mere political pressure that closed the temples (as witnessed by Plutarch writing of it long before this development came to pass). But it was unusual for a thinker who seemed to be on Christianity's side ("pre-Nicene" notwithstanding) to take this stance. Moreover, it remains eyebrow-raising to this day for Christians to be told that the essence of their religion is uncertainty; it certainly would have come as surprising news to those of Voegelin's readers who were really interested in what he was arguing, and not just looking for ammunition against communism.

I am not sure how seriously it was taken at the time by anyone else; but Voegelin himself was absolutely committed to not being tied down to any reified system, even one that was about the unfolding of the tendency to reification. This commitment was to undermine his most ambitious project -- originally planned as a six-volume series called Order and History (with The New Science frequently seen as prologue.) The first three volumes (of between 450 and 500 pages each) appeared in 1956-57, quite a short time for such dense and extensive work. They were well-received by scholars and popular among Voegelin's conservative audience. There was every reason to build success upon success. Instead, Voegelin suddenly applied the brakes. It was not until ten years later that Anamnesis appeared. This book -- not an official part of Order and History -- is, as I mentioned, in some ways the key to everything else. It signaled the serious conceptual difficulties that Voegelin had encountered along the way. In brief, he began to suspect that the entire project -- originally conceived as a tracing of historical consciousness from the ancient Near East and Greece to the present day in terms of the arising of symbol-complexes and their dissolution or their reification -- was itself suspect as too orderly, too much like a secret "system" purporting to give the real sense of history.

Volume four of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age, was not published until an additional seven years had passed. (Some of this delay is attributable to Voegelin's administrative responsibilities as well -- he had founded the Munich Institute for Political Science after returning to Germany in 1958 to occupy Max Weber's academic chair, vacant since Weber had died in 1920.) When volume four did appear, declaring at the outset that the whole enterprise had been re-thought and that the (real) gains of the first three volumes needed to be situated in a different and more flexible and open conceptual and symbolic context, reviewers were exceedingly divided. Already Voegelin's polymathy had frustrated attempts to understand what he was at -- was he an historian, a philosopher, a political scientist? Now this frustration was redoubled. No one could simply dismiss the book -- it was obviously a work of brilliance -- but no one knew quite what to do with it either. Many were disappointed.

But this revision -- a more far-reaching and profound kehre, in my opinion, than the failure of Heidegger to ever publish the second part of Being and Time -- was the mark not of Voegelin's inconsistency but of his integrity. The slowing-down and continual re-evaluation of his work meant that volume five, In Search of Order -- the last in the now-revised plan forOrder and History -- appeared only posthumously and in much smaller compass than the other volumes. (It should really be read in conjunction with volumes 12 and 28 of the Collected Works, which present his late published and unpublished essays, respectively.) This body of late work is extremely challenging, but not cripplingly so; anyone who is willing to go slowly and methodically can "get it." I will give one passage as an example of the substance and style, which moreover addresses the same issue as was mentioned above -- the transition from the "world full of gods". Note, too, in this excerpt, that the surpassing of the notion of "stages" with the conception of simultaneous poles of tension is part of the letting-go of an historicist account.

[S]ensitivity of human response to the mystery of divine revelation never was, and still is not, popular with dogmatic thinkers who want their fides to speak the language of the compact, personal gods. But the mystery resists and persists. The noetic thinker, who is conscious of this persistence, knows that even the fides of the One God does not put an end to his quest for the truly One in a reality that has to tell a story of tension and movement. ...On the one hand, the symbolization of the differentiated divine Beyond as One God would burden the symbol with the very compactness of the many gods that the differentiation tends to overcome; on the other hand, the insight into this difficulty lets the many gods appear in their dignity as experientially diversified representatives of the divine One. ... This tensional pressure appears to be a constant in the history of revelation. Neither will the gods disappear, nor will the Beyond let them live in peace. Compactness and differentiation, then, would not be simply historical stages of consciousness, the one succeeding the other in time, but poles of a tensional process in which the revelation of the Beyond has to overcome progressively a hard core of compact resistance without ever dissolving it completely. (In Search of History p 115-116)

Voegelin said (I paraphrase) that reading Santayana early in his life immunized him against the vogue of existentialim and particularly of Heidegger's influence. (It should be mentioned that one of his early books was On the Form of the American Mind -- it is Volume One in the Collected Works -- and in this, Voegelin was ahead of the curve.) In any case, I could say the same thing of Voegelin himself. I read him before I did any serious study of Heidegger, and I suspect that this helped ensure that, after the initial (quite significant) excitement had passed, I was able to pass more readily on to seeing Heidegger as one more philosopher, and not the culmination of a teleological process of the unfolding of the destiny of Western thought. Not that I understood Voegelin well -- I still feel I am only just beginning to understand sometimes what he was driving at. But from the beginning I suspected that he was one of the deepest, furthest-seeing, and least dogmatic of thinkers in the 20th century. I still think so, his mistakes, occasional slip ups, and false starts notwithstanding.

Anti-MacGuffin

Hitchcock's MacGuffin is the empty occasion for drama. Ostensibly, it doesn't matter what it is; it serves only to be the object of desire, a narrative engine. "Government secrets," plans for a submarine, compromising letters, the Ring of Power: the object just gets the story going; the story, however, is not about the object, but about the characters. It was a neat little trick of Zizek's to conflate this with the Lacanian objet a, the empty focus of the desiring gaze (often when one doesn't even know one is desiring.) Nonetheless, there is a question to be raised. The assertion that it "doesn't matter" what the object is, is ambiguous. True enough, the audience doesn't care about government secrets; it cares about Cary Grant escaping from thugs and cunning, ruthless bosses. But in the calculus of the story, there are indeed dire consequences, "should the secret fall into the wrong hands." Even if it turns out that the whole thing is a ruse -- that there is no "secret" -- this will be because this pretend-secret has a function in some other calculus; the agent who is an unknowing decoy or a sacrificed pawn is not playing the game he or she thinks is being played, but there is a game, and (in the story) it has an object, even though the audience may not know much or care much about what it is.

This point is sometimes deployed against the case of fantasy as a genre. Just what, exactly, are the "stakes" for the Dark Lord? While a real-life tyrant like Caligula may just be into orgies and a senatorship for his horse, an epic-scale evil like the Sith must have higher ambitions, right? Emperor Palpatine isn't just into relaxing in luxury, we assume. And Sauron -- what exactly does he plan to do if he finally can set the ring again on one of his remaining fingers? Just spread a thick cloud over Middle-Earth and enjoy the sounds of orcs cracking whips?

This ostensible reductio is supposed to function as a kind of "you didn't think of that, did you?" move. Probably for most derivative genre fantasy writers, it's a fair move. But Tolkien in fact had thought of it.

In the volume Morgoth's Ring, one of the books which Christopher Tolkien edited from his father's vast amount of unpublished daft material for The Silmarillion, there is an essay on "Notes on motives in the Silmarillion," in which Tolkien very explicitly addresses the question of the motive of both Sauron and Sauron's predecessor, the vastly more powerful and frightening Melkor (aka Morgoth), who is more or less the Satan-figure in the Silmarillion. Tolkien was engaged not in philosophy but in modern mythopoesis, and his account requires to be understood in its own terms, which are narrative; but despite its mythical tropes (he speaks for instance of Melkor's being having "pass[ed] into the physical constituents of the Earth"), he makes a philosophical, even a theological point. For Morgoth, initially the object was the imposing of his own will upon everything that had its origin outside of him -- the whole of the world. As long as the world resisted, this could be the project; but the only logical conclusion of it was the sheer nihilistic will to destroy all of "Arda," i.e., the created world.

Morgoth would no doubt, if he had been victorious, have destroyed even his own 'creatures', such as the Orcs, when they had served his sole purpose in using them: the destruction of Elves and Men. Melkor's final impotence and despair lay in this: that whereas the Valar (and in their degree Elves and Men) could still love "Arda marred," that is, Arda with a Melkor-ingredient, and could still heal this or that hurt, or produce from its very marring, from its state as it was, things beautiful and lovely, Melkor could do nothing with Arda, which was not from his own mind, and was interwoven with the thoughts and works of others: even left alone he could only have gone raging on until all was leveled again into a formless chaos. And yet even so he would have been defeated, because it would still have 'existed' independent of his own mind, a world in potential.

This is essentially a (brief) theology of evil. It is, doubtless, vulnerable to a kind of critique: "Really? Evil as will-to-destruction? A failed demiurge's cosmic temper-tantrum?" But this rejoinder is too simple and misses the point that what Melkor wants (so says Tolkien) is not merely impossible, but nonsensical. And so in his despair he must "settle" for nonsense.

Sauron, Tolkien specifies, had not reached this stage of nihilism. He was content that the world should exist, "so long as he could do what he liked with it;" but already this had become an idée fixe:

his 'plans', the idea coming from his sole isolated mind, became the sole object of his will, and an end, the End, in itself.

From this it should be clear that the apparent pointlessness of evil, which lies behind the question asked earlier ("what is the Dark Lord going to do if he gets the Ring?"), is intended. It is a feature, not a bug. Tolkien then adds a significant footnote:

But his capacity of corrupting other minds, and even engaging their service, was a residue from the fact that his original desire for 'order' had really envisioned the good estate (especially the physical well-being) of his 'subjects.'

I.e., Sauron's will really does have its roots in a good, albeit now perverted and obscured, desire. (This is already stated in The Lord of the Rings by Elrond: "Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so.") By the same token, one could say this even of Melkor; for the will to "self-expression" is not itself evil. But Melkor was immeasurably more powerful (and his fall more ancient) than Sauron's, and so his corruption was the greater. And so, by extension of the same principle, we are allowed to speculate that had Sauron succeeded and his will continued to turn upon itself, he too would have ended in will-to-destruction; in destroying (or attempting to destroy) Mordor, the Orcs, and eventually Arda itself.

A different writer gave us a similar (and no less fantastic) articulation of this destructive will in a famous passage:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.....

Power is power over human beings. Over the body-but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter external reality, as you would call it-is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute....We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. ...We make the laws of nature.... What are the stars?...They are bits of fire a few kilometers away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the center of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it. ...For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometers away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?....The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men....Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy- everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

Right at the beginning, one can note that Orwell has bitten the bullet about "motive." The Party has long passed the moment where they told anyone, even themselves, that they had anyone else's good at heart. Since Orwell never tells us the history of the ascendancy of the Party in Oceania, we are at liberty to doubt whether O'Brien is aptly characterizing the motives of the revolution; but that is a secondary point. Orwell's nightmare is justly known for many reasons, above all for its extreme and lucid articulation of this naked lust that had never before, perhaps, been so unapologetically spelled out. At the same time, as Orwell was doubtless aware, O'Brien's speech here betrays (not that this would have distressed O'Brien, who would have deftly employed doublethink) an inconsistency. The Party "is" omnipotent; and yet the Party is aiming for omnipotence ("when we are omnipotent, we will have no more need of science.") This is an index of a deeper, more desperate inconsistency. The project of the Inner Party is crucially dependent -- and this dependence is a metaphysical, not a "practical" one -- upon its need for something else to prey upon. A continual and inexhaustible source of helpless enemies. (One could spell this out in some detail with reference to Hegel's account of master and slave in the Phenomenology of Spirit.) This parasitism is precisely analogous with the incapacity of Morgoth to wipe out the world (though O'Brien claims to be able to do this). For now, the Party can be content to foster the sadism of tearing minds apart and putting them back together in shapes of their own choosing -- not unlike Morgoth's corruption of the Eldar and the Edain into Orcs. But ultimately, such a power -- if it should be ascendant, which is by no means impossible -- would end, like Tolkien's Dark Lord, in willing the destruction of everything.

This kind of unimaginable nihilism is easy to dismiss, as though it were a nonsensical boogeyman, or a massive projection. Doubtless we have many reasons to be skeptical of the notion of an "axis of evil;" to guard against casting even those who clearly will our destruction as simply willing Destruction per se. Much could be said about this; both about the hobbling of oneself when one undercuts one's moral intuitions by ruling unusable one of the most long-standing of moral categories, and about the many reasonable and good motivations for being tempted in this direction. That's yet another post. My point here is that neither Tolkien nor Orwell were naive about this question. Each recognized that the "threat" he was envisioning in their narratives was "too big" to be really conceived; that everything it entailed was not clearly spelled out. It is, in essence, a kind of anti-MacGuffin. But this does not make it merely a narrative trick.

Symbol, Doubt, History, Faith

[This is a more obviously theological post than many of mine.]

Father Stephen Freeman reminds us that the way we ask questions regarding "what really happened," underpinning skepticism and fundamentalism alike, is a side-effect of a tremendous shift in consciousness. (Some will remember that I reviewed Fr. Freeman's blog Glory to God for All Things last year in my set of Brief Blog Reviews.) He sets the stage with way the problem is usually looked at today:

The question of faith in contemporary society is a matter of fact – "do I think this event actually happened?" It is around this single point that believers seem to arrange themselves.

Fr. Freeman traces this to the birth of historical consciousness in the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation.

The assault on the authority of the Church required (and still requires) a substitute. By what authority is the Church to be judged defective? .... Scripture is one obvious answer – with the lingering question of authoritative interpretation. And it was at this point that history, as something of a rational science, had its foundations.... The meaning of Scripture had to be loosed from its place within tradition, and sheltered under the guise of an independent fact. This is the birth of history as a collection of facts.... In our time this factualized sense of history has become the sole locus of reality, authority, etc. We have become thoroughly “historicized.”

Fr. Freeman's first illustrations of the contrast between the previous mindset and our own, however, do not concern the difference between an event "literally happening" and a story told for some other reason. It isn't a matter of saying, Oh, the Feeding of the Five Thousand -- that's just a parable; or with a shake of the head, "Creation in Seven Days -- don't you see, the Bible isn't a cosmology textbook?" Rather, Fr. Freeman's examples have to do with allegory:

The frequent assertion of images and types within the Scriptures runs deeply counter to the modern mind. That the Mother of God is also the Ark, the Candlestand, the Jar of Manna, the Rod of Aaron, etc. is not a mere exercise in literary games. The Fathers (and the hymns of the Church) treat such assertions in a manner that carries as much weight as our modern sense of historical facts. They feel about such things the way we feel about our beloved concrete, provable, verifiable events. And that such assertions cannot be provable, or verifiable in a manner that would satisfy us, troubles them not in the least.

In short:

The Fathers simply do not think or feel in the manner in which we most commonly think or feel. Their perception of things is not the same as ours.

This complex of questions is so close to the heart of spiritual malaise that engaging with it in a dispassionate manner is extremely challenging. To enter into the consciousness that can understand things this way -- the ease of allegory and symbol without opposing them to the literal, without giving implicit veto power to a false dichotomy -- is part of what is meant by the frequent injunction in Christian spiritual writings to "put on the mind of the Fathers." But on the other hand, this "mind" can only be cultivated if we somehow already can relax our anxiety and step into faith in a different way than is assumed by the default definitions of our era.

This means that this world view is in one sense a prerequisite, and in another sense a result. This creates a paradox, which can be felt to varying degrees. At worst, it seems a sort of double-bind: if you have to ask, you'll never know; or, it's all grace, and without grace you can't understand... Pressed through to it's ultimate "logical" conclusion, this creates an impasse: there is no passage, however narrow, between the mind of the believer and an unbeliever, but only a discontinuity. This sort of guillotine-slice between two "ways of thinking' is often associated -- not entirely correctly -- with a certain thread in reformed theology, of which the work of Cornelius Van Til is a fair representative:

There can be no appeasement between those who presuppose in all their thought the sovereign God and those who presuppose in all their thought the would-be sovereign man. There can be no other point of contact between them than that of head-on collision.
--Van Til, The Intellectual Challenge of the Gospel, p. 19

Elsewhere Van Til nuanced this stark contrast -- a little:

the natural man, using his principles and working on his assumptions, must be hostile in principle at every point to the Christian philosophy of life....all men have all things in common metaphysically and psychologically, was definitely asserted, [but] the natural man has epistemologically nothing in common with the Christian. ...this latter assertion [must be] qualified by saying that this is so only in principle.... So far then as men self-consciously work from this principle [of sin, or autonomy], they have no notion in common with the believer. Their epistemology is informed by their ethical hostility to God.
--Van Til, The Defense of the Faith pp. 189-190

Although Van Til seems to restrict the ravages of depravity to unbeliever's epistemology, the effect here is much the same, since the whole question is, ostensibly, How Do I Know?

At this point,let us note, I have moved far from the Orthodox ambit of Fr. Freeman. We'll circle back.

It may surprise some (or maybe not) to read this, but I actually don't think that Van Til's sort of language is always out of place. I take my cue from Wittgenstein. Thus:

Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched.
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value p 45, circa 1944

Wittgenstein was quite comfortable with using religious language -- usually Christian language -- in a way that was not about corresponding with facts:

Predestination: It is only permissible to write like this out of the most dreadful suffering - and then it means something quite different. But for the same reason it is not permissible for someone to assert it as a truth, unless he himself says it in torment. - It simply isn’t a theory. - Or, to put it another way: If this is truth, it is not truth that seems at first sight to be expressed by these words. It’s less a theory than a sigh, or a cry.
ibid, 1937

But Wittgenstein also knew that it was very possible to take such words in an utterly wrong, and indeed harmful, sense; and he had very specific examples in mind, from his own experience:

In religion it must be the case that corresponding to every level of devoutness there is a form of expression that has no sense at a lower level. For those still at the lower level, this doctrine, which means something at the higher level, is null and void; it can only be understood wrongly, and so these words are not valid for such a person. Paul's doctrine of election by grace, for instance, is at my level irreligious and ugly nonsense. So it is not meant for me since I can only apply wrongly the picture offered me." If it is a holy and good picture, then it is so for a quite different level, where it must be applied in life quite differently than I could apply it.
ibid, 1937

The sort of language Van Til employs (and I am only using him as an example) is disastrous until you are ready for it. Press this too soon and all you get is, "oh, so I've got a 'spirit of rebellion,' do I, because I ask questions?" and then, what do you know, you actually do feel kinda rebellious!

However, the disjunction, the "head-on collision" Van Til mentions, can also, in specific circumstances -- at the "right level," Wittgenstein might say -- be exactly the right move. Such a paradox can have a salvific effect for some when the crisis is broken through. Suddenly, in a hitting-rock-bottom sort of way, utterly cornered by the Hound of Heaven, such a one can see the whole dilemma just snap open. For a brief moment, the nature of grace becomes obviously inescapable, and this experience, modulated into the key of "belief," is quite accurately rendered in the language of I-once-was-lost-but-now-am-found.

As a way of "putting on the mind of the Fathers," though, it's pretty undependable.

Another way, much more reliable, is ordinary practice: the everyday use of language and music and full-immersion liturgical discipline, which after long exposure can suddenly appear in retrospect (and sometimes even if it has seemed "rote" or merely antiquarian) as an ascetic training in seeing the world otherwise. It is slow, and of course also requires intentionality; but it has the advantage of going deep into a person.

From the outside -- the modern, "historicized" outside -- of course, both of these "methods," if I may use the word, look suspicious. The latter looks like simple acculturation ("brainwashing," I hear some of my atheist friends mutter); the former looks sort of like Stockholm Syndrome.

Fortunately, there is also a third way (and in fact, a "modern", even a "historicized" way): to see that there remain commonalities between us and this ancient world: and this in two directions -- for the ancients not as indifferent to fact as we may think in our caricatures (Origen for instance is perfectly calm about calling the account in Genesis 1 "not true in a bodily fashion," but he's also quite comfortable with the Empty Tomb being, well, really Empty -- and very recently vacated); nor are we indifferent to symbol, even though we may have a skewed relation to it now. (E.g.: money.) This is where philosophy as propaedeutic comes in, for taking this route is partly a matter of scholarship, partly of philosophy proper; curiously it hinges upon the very historical discipline which has encouraged the spiritual narrowing of which Fr Freeman speaks. This is part of what I mean when I speak, as I often do, of philosophy as a kind of Salvage Ops -- philosophy characteristically grants a critique and then presses it far enough to discern and rescue the essential experience in what is critiqued. The fact that even this is becoming very difficult is part of the poison of historicism, which at first advertises itself as "awareness of history," but eventually becomes an erasure of historical memory. (Compare, obviously, the Phaedrus.)

All these three ways can be put together; practice and study and crisis trading off; there is an important sense in which for any of us in the modern world this is almost essential. But a question arises: are we saying that this is what Christianity thinks is important? Being able to inhabit this allegorical landscape with perfect Keatsean negative capability, no "irritable reaching after fact and reason"? Being able to see the Virgin Mary as the Jar of Manna and the Ark of the Covenant? Is this ancient way of thinking and feeling differently, constitutive of salvation? Or is it, as it were, a kind of prerequisite?

Trick question. Everyone's "False dichotomy" buzzer should be going off. In the course of a (very informative) conversation in the comments, Fr. Freeman refers to the etymology of "symbol" ("putting together") and, pertinently, its antonym -- diabole. He cites Alexander Schmemann (one of the theologians of the 20th century, a man who was crucial in letting Christianity speak to our age), to wit:

in the common theological language as it takes shape between the Carolingian renaissance and the Reformation, and in spite of all controversies between rival theological schools, the “incompatibility between symbol and reality,” between “figura et veritas” is consistently affirmed and accepted. “To the ‘mystice, non vere’ corresponds not less exclusively ‘vere, non mystice.’” The Fathers and the whole early tradition, however—and we reach here the crux of the matter—not only do not know this distinction and opposition, but to them symbolism is the essential dimension of the sacrament, the proper key to its understanding. St. Maximus the Confessor, the sacramental theologian par excellence of the patristic age, calls the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist symbols (“symbola”), images (“apeikonismata”) and mysteries (“mysteria”). “Symbolical” here is not only not opposed to “real,” but embodies it as its very expression and mode of manifestation.
--Schmemann, For the Life of the World, pp. 138-139

After all, any sacramental Christian ought to be thinking, when you really receive the Eucharist as the Body and Blood of Christ, this is salvation.

And yet. While Scripture speaks of "putting on the mind of Christ," it does not have much to say about the capacity to be sanguine about icons or not uptight about whether such and such a miracle-story "really happened;" so urging us to cultivate such a mentality, while perhaps apposite, is still not quite obviously the same as relating to the truth of the miracle, or worshipping the God shown forth in the icon.

Thus the need not to substitute this "ancient way," the "Mind of the Fathers", for what is apprehended in this way, by this mind. I am very wary of phrasing the matter this way, and almost certainly have got it wrong. It may be that in really undergoing this noetic purification, one finds that there is no such difference -- but that is only the case at the end, not at the beginning: a matter of "level." One sets out not to "experience symbols" in a particularly penetrating mode, but to encounter God. It is, one might hazard, a question of form and content. This question may at some point become irrelevant -- and perhaps this point is even the most important point -- but it does not start out as irrelevant.

But surely this is too pat: "Set out to encounter God," indeed. As if God were a destination. Or as if I wanted to encounter Him! When I spend nearly every moment of every day running away. And no doubt, cultivating a different way of navigating facts and historicity, allowing them to become translucent, can itself be clever way of avoiding the real work of ascesis. But one may also suspect that -- even under such circumstances -- it may serve. If there is (as the Psalmist says) nowhere one can flee, not in the depths of the sea, not in Sheol, then even our ways of avoiding God must lead us to God. (Such, says C.S. Lewis, is "the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.") By grace one may find that even such ill-motivated or rote "practice" may still have been the occasion by which one trains oneself (or rather is trained by tradition) to be ready for the moment which will come -- the moment when there is no place left to hide. To see this moment and welcome it instead of panicking; to meet it with love and not fear.

There were indeed many "who had seen, and yet did not believe." They had had some experience of a kind of "content," but absent a certain "form," it turned out to not be the same content after all. And that is indeed, at least a point of the story -- whether or not it "really happened" in exactly that way.

Gallery

A conversation a while ago with a friend sparked some reflection upon the sorts of arguments, or (more generally) philosophical "moves," that I find inherently intriguing. Not persuasive, but fascinating -- the kind that make me want to pick them up, turn them around, see how they work. Many -- most -- turn out to be what I would call grammatical arguments: they hinge upon taking a word's meaning seriously, as if with a kind of immanent critique. a few others introduce a crucial distinction. And one or two are the sort of cautionary warning that serves as a more elaborate version of a "rule for thinking."

Wittgenstein: distinction between saying / showing. The limits of language about language; a "performative" moment at the very beginning of "Analytic" philosophy.

Anselm: "ontological proof." The "prayer of the intellect," Simone Weil called it. Much as with Zeno's refereeing of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, generation after generation of philosophers has felt called upon to refute Anselm. When that many philosophers (who otherwise agree on so little) all feel you are wrong, you are certainly doing something right.

C.S. Lewis: foundering of naturalism ("cause" vs "reason"). This has been elaborated and made more sophisticated by Plantinga and others, but I still think that Lewis' presentation in Miracles is, while flawed, the best short summary. If all "reasons" reduce to "causes," then one can have, by definition, no reason to believe this.

Descartes: cogito. Do I even need to justify this? This was probably my first foray into the canon of philosophy, in a conversation with my next-door neighbor when I was 10 or so. There is much to object to in Cartesianism, but the beauty and simplicity of this grammatical moment is too often overlooked by Descartes' critics.

Frege: against psychologism. The locus classicus here is his review of Husserl's first book, but the import extends far beyond. At issue is, what do we mean by "valid"? Not just "convincing"! Not even really really really convincing.

Brentano: structure of intentionality. "Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on." (Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint) A way of saying the obvious that suddenly shows that a great deal follows from the obvious.

Hume: is / ought non-transition. This one is taking a beating in some quarters these days via a kind of argument-by-poll. "Show me a counter-example!" is Sam Harris' refrain. This is a different argument.

Buber / Levinas: what encounter means. Otherness. This is the core of my debate with Monism, the claim that there is really One Big Thing. What I mean by "encounter" is not a sleight-of-perspective trick by which one part of a system forgets and then remembers another part.

Berkeley: The inconceivability of the inconceivable. Well, duh! Despite being lampooned by David Stove and many others as an argument "so bad it is hard to conceive of anyone being swayed by it," or words to that effect, it also has its defenders, notably (of late) Meillassoux. The beautiful thing about this defense is that Meillassoux doesn't believe the argument -- he just thinks it is strong. I.e., you don't have to be persuaded by an argument to admire it and think it is well worth, not just pausing over in the museum of Great Moments in Western Phil., but really being challenged by it.

Wilber: Pre-/Trans- Fallacy. This is a crucial distinction, and if Wilber is remembered for nothing else in fifty years, the elegance of this formulation will last. One thing that's often overlooked in considering it, is that those prepositions modify a noun: rationality.

Cantor / Gödel: knowing may exceed axiomatics. Like most of my generation I first bumped into this argument in Douglas Hofstadter's masterpiece. But I had the funny experience of being more and more persuaded by an argument Hofstadter was concerned to refute, by John Lucas, that (to put it briefly) human thinking was not reducible to the unfolding of algorithms. This application is only the beginning, though. It's not just that you can deduce something, it's what this capacity to deduce means.

Darwin, et al: time + randomness + stochastic mechanism + "anthropic" perspective can get you pretty much anything. Dennett's crucial modification in terms of "cranes" vs "skyhooks" (an elegant distinction) does much to expound the argument, which seems more or less irrefutable. So the pertinent question must be, is it -- or, in what sense is it -- interesting?

Great doubt, great enlightenment. Ok, this is not an "argument", it's a description of ascetic experience.

And, finally, the argument from Moral Realism. What do we mean by "Good"? And if we take this meaning seriously -- what follows? Or, if we think we "have no right" to this meaning -- then, (1) can we dispense with it? (and I don't mean "practically", I mean, coherently); and (2), if not, then... (This is very close to St Anselm's proof, above).

Looking over the above list, one could note that the verb "means" -- in italics, no less -- recurs frequently. Well, I warned you. One philosopher's Achilles' heel is another's Archimedean pivot. The trick is, to make it both.

linked

From the preface to Recoltes et Semailles

Passionate love is, also, driven by the quest for discovery. It provides us with a certain kind of understanding known as 'carnal' which also restores itself, blossoms forth and grows in depth. These two impulses -- that which animates the mathematician at his desk (let's say), and that which impels the lover towards the loved one -- are much more closely linked than is commonly believed, or, let us say, people are inclined to want to believe.

--Alexandre Grothendieck (28 March 1928 – 13 November 2014)

faith, form, content: a fragment.

(From work-in-progress, and possibly may be left on the cutting-room floor. Some details may not make a great deal of sense out of context, but I think the gist is comprehensible.)

In one crucial sense, Meillassoux is right: philosophy as it culminates in correlationism (and it is indeed a culmination, for Meillassoux) does yield to "religiosity as such," i.e., to fideism. What Meillassoux seems to miss is that the Biblical paradox, like philosophy, is a critique of "religiosity." Only, whereas philosophy opens upon the pure “form” of faith -- without content -- Meillassoux would rather give us pure content -- "brute" content, as it were: contingency as such. The Biblical critique (the articulation of "revelation", i.e., theology), however, does not pursue reasons, as philosophy does, but the Person. Because of this, it was able to navigate the upheavals of cosmology; but it is also sanguine regarding the critique of "Sufficient Reason". Ancient philosophy does indeed lead up to the question of revelation; and music is the grammar of this preparatio. Modern philosophy accepts the formal critique of religion by the Bible, but not the experiential one; it thinks it can stipulate it and move on. Thus "faith" becomes a formal "as-if," and is either uncritiquable but empty, or (if there is any content to it) superstitious. Meillassoux’s novel move is to reject all this, in favor of "content" without form -- pure contingency. The only questions, then, are (1) whether this move is consistent and thinkable, and (2) whether philosophy can possibly be satisfied with such a conclusion and remain philosophy.